“Kitchen Confidential” became a springboard to a television career, which, in turn, led to more book deals, more television shows, more opportunities to keep taking in the world. “Does that find him happiness? Of course, it doesn’t, because happiness doesn’t come from external things.”Īccording to the film, the possibility of happiness was the question that propelled and consumed Bourdain. Bourdain was “given everything he always wanted: money, and a chance to travel, and freedom,” he continued. “It’s like the last vestiges of his old life,” Neville said. When Neville uncovered the footage, which was shot by the photographer Dmitri Kasterine, for a documentary that was never released, it felt like kicking off the lock on a treasure chest. We see him head off on his first book tour, encounter early fans, and learn in real time that the book is a best-seller despite being solidly in middle age, Bourdain fidgets on the cusp of fame with the gawky, awestruck charisma of a teen-ager. “Roadrunner” begins where Bourdain’s life as a public figure begins: it’s 1999, he’s a forty-three-year-old undecorated cook and aspiring writer, and his big break-the bombastic New Yorker essay “ Don’t Eat Before Reading This”-has become the basis for a book, “ Kitchen Confidential,” that’s about to go off like a star in supernova. Rogers should be simple and deep and loving storytelling Orson Welles should be chaotic and smart storytelling. “How I should tell a story is often expressed by the subject: Mr. “When I’m making a film, I often feel like the instructions are in the box,” he told me.
He grew up in Southern California, the son of a rare-book dealer, and as a young man worked as a journalist in New York and San Francisco before turning to documentary. Neville is fifty-three, with close-cropped silver hair and stylishly owlish glasses. I recently spoke with Neville about “Roadrunner,” in a conversation that began, via Zoom, when he was at home in Pasadena, California, and concluded in person, a few days later, at the restaurant of a Manhattan hotel, while the film played to an audience of journalists and Academy members in a screening room downstairs. The new documentary “Roadrunner” uses A.I.-generated audio without disclosing it to viewers. The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice “You’re probably going to find out about this anyway, so here’s a little preëmptive truth-telling,” Bourdain says, in disembodied voice-over, in the movie’s first few minutes.
In “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” which is in theatres on July 16th, Neville uses interviews, archival footage, and a few unlikely tricks to build a devastating argument for Bourdain as both the hero and villain of his own story-your standard-issue broken genius, at once childlike and world-weary, but saved from cliché by the sheer extraordinariness of his character. “I was the grief counsellor, who showed up to talk to everybody.” Neville specializes in unknotting the real story from the public narrative (in 2014, he won an Academy Award for the documentary “20 Feet from Stardom,” about the lives of rock-and-roll backup singers), and his filmography reveals a particular penchant for examining the lives of men who transcend the normal parameters of fame: Johnny Cash, Orson Welles, Mr. “These were the hardest interviews I’ve ever done, hands down,” he told me. In 2019, about a year after Bourdain’s death, the documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville began talking to people who had been close to Bourdain: his family, his friends, the producers and crew of his television series. The singularity of his celebrity and the suddenness of his death have fuelled an uncommonly intense, uncommonly enduring grief-a personal sense of public loss, of a sort usually reserved for popes and Presidents. Bourdain was a television megastar, a fluid and conversational writer, a social-media gadfly, a pointed cultural commentator, and seemingly everyone’s best friend. “I wish Anthony Bourdain was here to see this,” countless people have tweeted over the past thirty-seven-ish months, on occasions as varied as a New York gubernatorial candidate ordering a cinnamon-raisin bagel, the White House serving a McDonald’s banquet, the collapse of the American restaurant industry, and the sputtering attempts to revive the same. It’s been three years since Anthony Bourdain died, by suicide, in June of 2018, and the void he left is still a void.